Palestinians Reject Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration

A Palestinian protester prepares to burn a U.S. flag during clashes with Israeli troops near the West Bank city of Ramallah, on Thursday.

Photogaraph by Mohamad Torokman / Reuters

On Wednesday, Donald Trump insisted that his declaration that the United
States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was “nothing more or
less than the recognition of reality,” given that Israel has made West
Jerusalem the seat of its government since 1949. Downplaying warnings
that the move might provoke widespread protests from Palestinians, Trump
promised that “the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty” in
Jerusalem “are subject to final status negotiations between the
parties.” Hedged with these qualifications, the declaration is merely
symbolic, much like George W. Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon in April,
2004, which asserted how “unrealistic” it was to expect from Israel “a
full return” to the 1967 borders. (Those borders were precisely what the
Bush Administration defaulted to when, with Sharon gone, negotiations
became serious in 2008.)

But symbols matter, especially when it comes to a city notorious for
them. On Thursday, thousands of demonstrators rallied in the West Bank cities of Hebron and al-Bireh, chanting, “Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Palestine.” Protests erupted in Gaza, as well, and the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, called for a
new intifada, or uprising, by Palestinians in response to Trump’s
announcement. By nightfall, at least thirty-one people had been wounded by Israeli gunfire, and the Times reported that the Israeli military
was dispatching additional battalions to the West Bank and that “the
Palestinian response appeared to be teetering between a limited wave of
protests and a full-blown explosion of violence, as schools were closed,
stores were shuttered and the public largely observed a general strike.” Multiple Palestinian factions called for a “day of rage” to coincide with Friday prayers.

For most Palestinians, Trump’s declaration seemed like a symbol of old
imperial fiat, an intention by the world’s superpower to hand the whole
of Jerusalem to the Jewish people—a kind of Balfour Declaration for the
city. Taken this way, as Robin Wright wrote, Trump’s action
enraged Muslims throughout the region—especially in Jordan, whose King
Abdullah has been most vocal in protest. Jerusalem always seems like the
ground near a volcano; you never know when the great eruptions come, but
you can almost feel the pressure building under your feet.

Trump’s announcement can also be seen as a symbol of favoritism from the
purported mediator, a coat of many colors to provide cover to Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s Prime Minister is besieged by investigations, rising
opposition forces, and international isolation. Trump is tossing
Netanyahu—and himself—“a win,” something to sell to Likud’s nationalist,
religiously inclined political base, about which Trump knows a thing or
two; something Trump can pass off as bipartisan respect for Zionist
history. Trump has given Mahmoud Abbas no corresponding gift, though the
latter is far more vulnerable. At least since Abbas assumed the
Presidency of the Palestinian Authority, in 2004, he has staked his
reputation on the idea that nonviolent diplomacy and state-building can
bring change, while Hamas made gains mocking him for trying. Trump might
have made a corresponding declaration in Palestine’s favor, say, that
America is joining with other members of the United Nations General
Assembly in supporting Resolution 67/19, adopted in 2012, upgrading
Palestine to “non-member observer state” status. He might have pressured
the Israeli government to ease the residency requirements for
Palestinian-American entrepreneurial talent in West Bank cities. He has
not been this creative.

“Abbas did everything that the Americans asked of him, security
coördination, state-building, reconciliation, land swaps to settlement blocs, and is
now looking very weak,” Bassim Khoury, the C.E.O. of Pharmacare PLC, the
Palestinian generic-drug manufacturer, and a former Minister of
Economics of the Palestinian Authority, told me. “I am monitoring the
attitudes on WhatsApp strings, and sentiment is for greater militancy.
In Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, America’s proxies have apparently been
defeated. People are joking that Trump talks and talks but delivers
Americans only Merry Christmas and his Jerusalem stance.”

The big change, Khoury said, is that Arabs in Jerusalem are feeling the
power of mobilization since they took to the streets to prevent Israel
from installing cameras at the Aqsa Mosque. “I was there myself, four
times,” Khoury said. More and more, he told me, you hear calls for new
elections, or for Abbas to resign. Khoury is no supporter of Hamas, but
he, too, recognizes realities on the ground. “Nobody watches Al-Jazeera anymore; everybody I know is watching Al-Mayadeen TV, a station supporting Assad and Lebanon's Hezbollah. The anger must eventually come out.”

The point is that, for Palestinians, the status quo is not a neutral
thing; it works very much in Israel’s favor, given the Netanyahu
government’s continuing settlement-building, and its efforts to
obliterate the line between the Arab East and the Jewish West of
Jerusalem. Trump’s insistence that his declaration is realism, implying
that it does nothing to disrupt the status quo, is part of the problem.

The declaration was not an effort to reassure Israelis that America
stands with them as they face the hard compromises any “deal” will
entail. In the nineteen-seventies, one could make the case—as President
Anwar Sadat did—that a “psychological barrier” in Israel was holding
back the peace process. Israel’s leadership, it was assumed, was
inclined to some kind of territorial compromise, if not with the P.L.O.
then with Jordan, but could not be persuaded to relinquish any kind of
strategic depth unless the Israeli public as a whole could be reassured
that Egypt, or America, or both, recognized Israel’s red lines,
including its capital in Jerusalem. In that context, Sadat’s 1977 visit
to Jerusalem—in effect, recognizing the Western city as Israel’s
capital—was electrifying.

This is hardly the situation today, however. The Israeli government is
stacked with ministers and coalition partners who regard the entire
ancient land of Israel as their divine patrimony. The Obama
Administration made multiple efforts —selling Israel the most advanced
fighters, funding anti-missile batteries, and signing a ten-year foreign-aid memorandum—to reassure the Israeli public of America’s concern for
Israel’s security. But the version of Israel that Netanyahu is trying to
consolidate today does not need reassurance. It takes what it wants.
Israel Katz, the Transportation Minister, spoke for the government when
he insisted in an Israeli television interview that Trump’s announcement
implies that Jerusalem is to be united under the sovereignty of the
Jewish people—a tribute to its ancient founding. Recognizing Israel’s
exclusive rule as a fait accompli is the only way of to prove one
“accepts Israel as a Jewish state,” he said. It is this version of
Israel that, symbolically, Trump has blessed.

Yet it is unclear how the Palestinians will respond. Ammar Aker, the
C.E.O. of Paltel, a telecommunications firm that is the largest
private-sector company in the Palestinian Authority, said the scale of
the reaction to Trump’s announcement was worrying. “Watching the
reaction on the ground today and the violence that broke out in the West
Bank is not promising,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I do not want my teenage
son to be dragged into any activity, not because I do not want him to do
so, but only because I am afraid that he will be hurt, like many other
kids, by the Israeli soldiers. I am sure every parent now is worried
about his/her kids. Obviously, Trump is relaxed and very happy to create
such a mess.”

Khoury told me that the war in Syria, which had caused Palestinians to
fear chaos and the empowerment of militant groups, acted as a check on
mass street protests. But, now that the Assad regime has won a clear
victory in Syria, the mood among Palestinians has changed. The days
ahead, particularly Friday, will show whether a repeat of the last
intifada, which stretched from 2000 to 2005 and killed thousands, is
what the city is risking. “Two years ago,” Khoury told me, “I would not
have expected violence, given the revulsion people felt, looking across
the border to Syria and chaos. But things have changed. The vast
majority of people don’t feel they have as much to lose as the people
who run the businesses. I would not have predicted violence in 2000
either.”

This piece has been updated to clarify Bassim Khoury's characterization of Trump's policy and of Al-Mayadeen TV.

Bernard Avishai teaches political economy at Dartmouth and Hebrew University, and is the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” among other books. He was selected as a Guggenheim fellow in 1987.